[Excerpt from the Holocaust chapter (18) about Jewish communist
leaders in Poland]:
World
War II Polish anti-Nazi leader Stephan
Korbanski writes that
two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the
other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish
communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who
knew Stalin well.
The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins,
which
exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy
of
Poland's independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites,
whose
loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of
their
residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73]
The principal instrument of Berman's power was his total control
of
the Ministry of State Security, which began -- under Stalin's
instructions -- to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often
by
simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland's
independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]
Jewish
historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish
youth and proletariat played an important ('although not exclusive') role in the
apparatus of oppression." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski,
of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of
its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94] With Jews representing about 10% of the
Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in
communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party]
often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per
cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in small cities like ours,
almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration.
[SCHATZ, p. 96]
In Warsaw about 65 per
cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51
percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only
19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the
International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the
communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most
of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and
Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists
were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish court
proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those
accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p.
36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions
of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism."
[SCHATZ, p. 100]
Furthermore, the
symbology of three very high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and
Zambrowski -- in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions, "became a lasting part of anti-Semitic
vocabulary." [SCHATZ, p. 206] "All
three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob]
Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p.
63] As the Catholic Primate of
Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was
now "due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and
endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not
wish to have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]
Chaim Kaplan even
noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war
German-Soviet treaty: "Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the
Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received
with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's
'friend' Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about
race." [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]
Stephan
Korbanski also notes that the Soviet Communist secret police
"team assembled by
Berman [whose brother Adolf was chairman of
the Jewish
Committee in Poland till 1947, when he immigrated to Israel]
[CHECINSKI, M.,
1982, p. 85] at the beginning of his rule were all
Jewish -- Vice
Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman
Romkowski) [who
once interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials
like General
Julius Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security
police chief
Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), 'Colonel
Czaplicki,' and
Zygmut Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials
who oppressed
Poles in the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a
member of the
Communist Council of State, has stated that 'it was
unfortunate that
all the department directors in the Ministry of State
were Jews.'"
[KORBANSKI, p. 78]
"Jacek Rozanski,"
notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was "director of the Investigative
Department of the Polish State Security Ministry" and was "sentenced in 1955 to
five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957 sentenced him to fifteen years]"
for "using inadmissible means of persuasion during interrogations ... Son of a
prominent Warsaw Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist 'Hajnt'),
Rozanski was a dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until
the end." [BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] "All the detainees described [Rozanski] as an
exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture prisoners
needlessly," notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, "... Rozanski's Jewish
origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his Polonized name." [CHECINSKI,
M., 1982, p. 80]
The aforementioned
Anatol Fejgin was head of the "Tenth Department of the Polish State Security
Ministry -- the special unit answerable to the Party First Secretary and
concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and he] was sentenced at the
same trial in 1957 to twelve years' imprisonment." [BORKOWICZ, p.
344]
Jewish
author Michael Checinski notes the post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov
who
"held the
relatively modest post of head of Soviet advisers in
Poland.
But no serious
operational decisions on any question pertaining to
political
provocations or police terror could ever be taken without
Davidov's
consent. On the one hand, Davidov and his personal
network
supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in all
the
mainstays of
real power in Poland (the armed forces, security
service, party
apparatus, state administration, and industry). But
he also was
responsible for overseeing the entire Polish apparatus
of terror."
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]
Abel Kainer (a
pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds that
"The archetype of the Jew during the first ten years of the
Polish
People's Republic was generally perceived as an agent of the secret
political police. It is true that under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to
1948)
the key positions in the Ministry of State Security were held by Jews or
persons of Jewish background.
It is a fact which cannot be
overlooked, little known in the West and seldom mentioned by the
Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk about Stalin's anti-Semitism ....
The machinations of communist terror functioned in Poland in a
matter
"The feeling that Jews
are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many westerners," wrote Stanislaw
Krajewski, under his own name. "The only sense it has derives from the Jewish
participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that
a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in
1939." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did not look favorably at such a scenario.
World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts -- in the West against the
Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.
Even a Jewish
scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that
one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism was
primarily caused by "Jewish characteristics," concedes that
"After the Polish
communist seizure of power in 1948 there were
Roman Zambrowski, who did play key roles in the party,
the
In
another, related, example of the usual sharp double standard of Jewish morality
and responsibility, in an article entitled, "Lithuania May Charge Jews for
Crimes Against Humanity," in December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
reported the Lithuanian response to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United
States Congressmen to the president of Lithuania, insisting that he "put
suspected [World War II] criminals on trial." Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor
general of Lithuania, "alarmed local Jewish leaders" by announcing that his
office "would not only study the massacres of Jews committed by both Germans and
Lithuanians during the war, but also crimes committed by Jews against
Lithuanians when the country was under Soviet control." "Of course there were Jews who suffered
from Lithuanians," said Pednycia, "But there were also just the opposite cases,
and we all know that." "The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police," noted
JTA reporter Lev Krichevsky, "has prompted many Lithuanians to share the
sentiments expressed by the prosecutor general." The chairman of the Jewish community in
Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the prosecutor's comments about
Jews by declaring them "absolutely false," "non-ethical," and "historically
wrong." [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16]
Jewish pre-eminence in
communist terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine was the same. A Canadian
of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a 1997 volume published in his
homeland entitled "The Jewish Conquest of the Slavs." It was produced by
Security Service of the Ukraine, today's state police agency. In tabulating the
nationalities of 183 biographies in the volume of leading officials in the
terrorist Soviet secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak
notes, on average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This percentage
doesn't include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish identities,
a practice common in Eastern Europe. As Prytulak
concludes,
"One possible reason
that Jews incessantly paint the false image of
themselves as victims
of Ukrainians is because of the reality that
Ukrainians have been
among the foremost victims of Jews ... A
more thoughtful
examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism
reveals many reasons
for viewing it -- at least in some of its
manifestations -- not
as an irrational and unexplainable and
gratuitous hatred, but
as a natural and understandable antipathy
from an acquaintance
with Jewish misbehavior." [PRYTULAK]
Richard Rhodes notes
the prominence of Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and
future (Jewish) nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller's family
there:
"The leaders of the
Commune and many among its officials were
Jewish ... Max Teller
warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming.
Teller's mother
expressed her fears more vividly. 'I shiver at what my
people are doing,' she
told her son's governess in the heyday of the
Commune. 'When this is
over there will be a terrible revenge.'"
[RHODES, R., 1986, p.
111-112]
Bela Kun, notes Louis
Rapoport,
"a Jew, [was] the
cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in
Hungary and later
Stalin's chief of terror in the Crimea." [RAPOPORT,
L., 1990, p. 56]
In Russia, the "home"
of communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including
the terrorist secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the
same. [See details -- Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar
Kaganovich, head of the "Apparatus of Terror," Jewish dominance of the Soviet
concentration camp system, et al -- earlier] As Richard Pipes notes: "Unlike the
mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening
detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains
concealed." [PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]
The following
observation is written by a Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal
Jewish framing of Russian perception about the subject as irrationally
anti-Semitic:
"There is a tendency
in Russian intellectual circles "to view the
Bolshevik Revolution
as an essentially non-Russian phenomenon,
which took place under
the influence of the minority nations in the
Russian empire,
chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the
political terror as a
phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews
(this element is to be
found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate]
Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and
Valentin Kataev, the
official writer). Such an attitude is also
in belles-lettres,
portraying the Jews as plotters who, since Peter
the Great, have sought
to harm Russia and are now corrupting
Soviet society. In
this manner anti-Jewish pogroms and measures
in the past are
presented as protests against exploitations." [ETTINGER,
p.
21]
In communist
Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia,
the number of Jewish officers
in the dreaded OSS (the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much
as 75% of the total) -- merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175] Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek
Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with
Polish names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990,
suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish.
[SACK, p. 183]
In 1992, when Shlomo
Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish authorities who
were looking into his past as the commandant of a post-World War II communist
concentration camp for Germans and nationalist Poles, "Shlomo went home, wrote a
cousin in Israel, asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took
the first plane that he could to Tel Aviv," leaving his Catholic wife behind.
[SACH, p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised
him that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in
the OSS "because it would increase anti-Semitism." [SACH, p.
169]
Surviving
prisoners under Morel's rein had testified that:
* "The
commandant was Morel, a Hun in human form."
* "The
commandant was Morel, a Schweinehund without equal."
* "The
commandant, Morel, appeared. The clubs and the dog whips
rained down on us. My nose was broken, and my ten nails were
beaten blue. They later fell off."
* "The
commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw him with my own eyes kill
many of my fellow prisoners." [SACK, p. 167]
After World War
II, writes Richard Lucas, "Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed Red flags
to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers, and filled
administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One report estimated that
seventy-five per cent of all the top administrative posts in the cities of Lwow,
Bialystok, and Luck were in Jewish hands during Soviet occupation ... The entire character of the University
of Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the percentage
of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent; Ukrainians 15 per cent;
Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12
per cent, and 85 per cent, respectively." [LUCAS, p. 128]
"The evidence,
"observed Jewish commentator Aleksander Smolar, "is overwhelming: large numbers
of Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of
Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator." [PIOTROWSKI,
p. 50] "Thousands of Polish survivors' testimonies, memoirs, and works of
history," notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski, "tell of Jewish celebrations,
of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish collaboration (denunciations, manhunts,
and roundups of Poles for deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded
executions, of Jewish pro-Soviet citizens' committees and militias, and of the
high rates of Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion
of 1939." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]
Testimony to the
Jewish Polish response to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following
Jewish accounts, from the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in
Israel:
"When the Bolsheviks
entered the Polish territories they displayed a great
distrust of the Polish
people, but with complete faith in the Jews ... they
filled all the
administrative offices with Jews and also entrusted them
with
top level positions."
[from the town of Grodno]
"I must note that,
from the very first, the majority of positions in the
Soviet agencies
were taken by Jews." [from the town of Lwow]
"The Russians rely
mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,
segregating,
naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat." [from the
town of
Zolkwia]
"A Jewish doctor
recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed
themselves into a 'komsomol,' toured the countryside,
smashing
Catholic shrines."
[near the town of Jaworow]
"Whenever a
[pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some
other sort of joyful
event took place, the visual effect was always the
same -- Jews." [from the town of
Lwow]
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 - As Piotrowski notes, these comments have
originally published in Polish]
"The victims of
the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by his Jewish
subordinates," says Stephan Korbanski,
"during the
first ten years of the war numbered tens of thousands.
Most of them
were Poles who had fought against the Germans in
the resistance
movement. The communists judged, quite correctly,
that such Poles
were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet
rule and were
therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned
to the Jews
because they were thought to be free of Polish patriotism,
which was the
real enemy." [KORBANSKI, p. 79]
Korbanski then goes on
to name and detail 29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned)
of the communist elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism.
But political winds in the communist world shifted drastically. Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish
communist officials were purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link
to Israel's 1967 military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs
and Jewish Russian loyalties -- per Israel -- were put into question.
[KORBANSKI, p. 85]
"In places like
Gleibwitz," writes John Sack, "the Poles stood against the prison walls as
Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, 'Ready! Aim! Fire!,' shot
them, and told the Polish guards, 'Don't talk about this.' The guards, being
Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office's brass
[of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of
themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots ... Stalin ... had hired all the Jews
on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security, his
instrument in the People's Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles went to
war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation, and
Imprisonment." [SACK, p. 139]
All this, of course,
including the Poles own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews
in the brutal communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional
self-imposed Jewish estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile
acquiescence to Nazi rule is part of the unscholarly "gutter literature" that
the likes of David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.
In 1984, a Polish
journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the
despised Jewish former "Minister of State Security" in post-war communist
Poland:
Berman: "I was against too large a concentration of Jews in
certain
institutions ... it wasn't the right thing to do and it was a
necessary evil that we'd been forced into when we
[communists]
took power when the Polish intelligentsia
was boycotting us...
Q: In 1948-49 you arrested
members of the [Polish] Home
Army Council of Aid to Jews, the 'Zegata' ... Mr. Berman!
The security services who were all or nearly all Jews arrested
Poles because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi]
occupation, and you say the Poles are anti-Semites. That's
not nice.
Berman: ... It was wrong
that that happened. Certainly it was wrong ...
It was a small group, but very dedicated, and it took
enormous risks to look after Jews during the war."
[TORANSKA, p. 321]
Toranska also talked
to Roman Werbel, a prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major
Polish communist journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality
wrought by Jewish security officers upon Poles in fomenting
anti-Semitism:
"Beating causes degradation not only in the person who is beaten,
but in the person doing the beating as well. So it's better to
shoot
someone than to beat him ... There are principals you have
to
stick to in beating, however Johnny has to be beaten by
Johnny
and not Moshe ... I can see now that there were too many Jews in
the security services." [TORANSKA, p. 109]
Jewish apologist
Michael Checinski (whose world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent
anti-Semitism model, whereby even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are
themselves considered victims of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an
anti-Semitic communist regime) argues that
"while by coincidence
or evil design, Jewish officials were often placed
in the most
conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for
all the regime's
crimes ...[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62] ... Jews -- and
especially those with
Jewish names or striking Semitic features -- could
be placed in the most
controversial posts (for example, those dealing
with Church affairs or
the campaign against the political underground)
and thus deflect antiregime feelings into
anti-Semitism. This policy was
implemented not only
in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe, where
the new [communist]
governments, ruling only with the military support
of the Soviet army,
were seen by their own peoples as puppets."
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982,
p. 63]
In 1999, the
government of Poland was still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now
living in England), who in the post-World War II communist regime was Poland's
chief military prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem
Report, say "that Brus ... played a key role in the trial and execution of a
hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf ... The anti-Communist
Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but posthumously pardoned in
1989, was an intelligence officer in the underground Polish Home Army in World
War II." [WINNER, D., p. 37]
In 1994,
the New York Times discussed the case against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a
well-known German Jewish literary critic who had emigrated from Poland. "He was
forced to admit his involvement with the Polish secret police from 1944 to
1950," says Carol Oppenheim, "after his name turned up on the front page of a
Warsaw newspaper publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive."
[OPPENHEIM, p. 39]
"Hundreds of Jews," writes Jewish author John Sack, "were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany ... [SACK, p. 6] ... Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names ... [SACK, p. 39] ... The talk was in Yiddish, mostly ... About three out of four of the officers -- two hundred rowdy boys -- in the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland's large industrial city] were Jews ... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that belonged to a [Polish prisoner]." [SACH, p. 40]
